[XeTeX] Missing output from xelatex

[Jonathan Kew]

On 2 Dec 2004, at 1:36 pm, Jan Eden wrote:

> Hi,
>
> this is a strange thing. I wrote a CGI script to generate PDF 
> documents, which worked fine with pdflatex. It prints the log (last 
> lines):
>
> Output written on blabla.pdf (1 page, 37554 bytes).
> Transcript written on blabla.log.
>
> And correctly created the pdf file. But when switching my script to 
> use xelatex, I get this:
>
> Output written on blabla2.pdf (1 page).
> Transcript written on blabla2.log.
>
> A similar output - but no pdf file! tex, aux, log files are created as 
> before.
>
> The (Perl) script contains this command:
>
> system "/usr/local/teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current/xelatex 
> /Users/jan/Desktop/briefe/$letterfields{dateiname}.tex";
>
> When executing the same command on the tex file manually, the pdf file 
> is created.
>
> Folder permissions are set correctly (otherwise, the log and aux files 
> could not be written, too). What is happening here?
>

I notice you're using an explicit path to the xelatex executable. Is 
this because it's not found in the command search path? That probably 
explains the failure.... my guess is that it fails to find and launch 
the xdv2pdf tool that is actually responsible for creating the PDF. (It 
would be nice if xetex reported an error in this situation!)

Try setting the path, so that you can use
	system "xelatex /Users/jan/....";
and see if that solves the problem.

JK